[ Contents | Search | Post | Reply | Next | Previous | Up ]
From: Charlie Healey
Date: 07 Oct 2008
Time: 12:45:35 -0500
Remote Name: 129.93.99.57
Thanks Ashley for your post. Having parents accept that stuttering is occurring and being open about the topic is a very critical step in therapy. Usually, this is not a problem but as you have mentioned, it does come up in some cases. With any case, I would talk with the parents and try to get an idea of why they object to me or anyone else calling what their child does "stuttering." Usually there is such a negative connotation to the word, that's why people are afraid to use it or they don't want their child to feel bad about what they do. I agree with that but refraining from calling it stuttering usually doesn't help the situation and confuses the child because the child will hear the word used by other people. I try to tell parents that it is just a word and disfluency is another word that can mean the same thing. Sometimes they are okay with disfluency but not stuttering. The point is that we all need to talk about disruptions in the speech as some word so that it is clear what we are talking about and that the child can hear himself do what we are hearing as disfluencies. I also ask the child what word they use to describe what they do when the sounds/words get repeated or prolonged (e.g., bumpy, sticky, blockage, tightness, etc. ) Openness about what is happening leads to acceptance and I don't see any value in working on stuttering without calling it something. Now, for the client that has Asperger's Syndrome, the way in which you talk about it might be a little more important. I had a case too like this and the disruptions were not the classic stuttering behaviors but more like things that normal types of speech disruptions that were quite distracting when the child talked. So, we worked more on the pragmatics of communication than stuttering modification strategies so the child could understand what we were trying to accomplish in making talking easier to produce and understand. This worked well for this type of client and essentially, we didn't do stuttering therapy in the traditional sense. Hopefully, this has clarified what I meant by "accepting stuttering" but if not, please reply and I can discuss this further.